Today on my internet spiderhole:

* The Starry Wisdom Of Warren 27oct09 – jabbering about message boards, tribes, making things, shagging

* Looking for new industrial/electro recommendations

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread – last day for ruminations and memories in re: last weekend’s comics event

* Musicians, Bands, Singers, Noisemakers – plug/talk thread

* Food & Cooking Oct 09 – learn how to poison your friends and relatives

* Halloween Costumes — Bat-Bloomers, in the name of god

(sound of trumpets)

(out into the freezing bloody cold)

This is Warren Ellis dot com. I’m a writer. Good morning.

(image by padraig)

I am greatly fond of Natural Snow Buildings, an experimental/postrock unit from France. And last.fm has a bunch of their stuff for free download. Good old last.fm — don’t know how it’s taken this long to root through their free-mp3 archive. Here’s the page you can grab this track from. It has superficial resemblances to, say, the peak work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: but instead of GY!BE’s ascents (or perhaps escalantes, if you’re Matt Webb), they produce zones, spaces, still fields. Good night music. (And it’s dark here in Britain.)

If you go to Brian Wood’s flickr stream right now, you’ll find the first five pages of his new NORTHLANDERS sequence, THE PLAGUE WIDOW.

At my internet bumhole tonight:

* Emma Vieceli’s DRAGON HEIR: REBORN – online and for free ^_^ – reminder (because part 3 went up today) and discussion thread

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread

* T-shirt Of The Week #001 – LOVE – discussion thread

* The Weekly Listening Thread (26octo9)

* Halloween Costumes – because Goth Christmas is almost upon us.

* Sarah Sharp’s CHANGING STATES – in support of the excellent book, which needs your vote at the Blurb book contest, too

* 8tracks Mixtapes – we love 8tracks. Give me more stuff to listen to.

I just noticed that Zoe Keating’s sublime "Sun Will Set" is offered as a free download by last.fm. You can click through to last.fm here and grab one for yourself. I talk to Zoe occasionally on Twitter. She is very nice.

New photos of his time in Greenland and the Arctic. I’m just going to show you one of the new photos here, prefaced by Dave’s note:

Ice sheet sliding towards Helheim Glacier, Sermilik Fjord, East Greenland. to get a sense of scale, that ice-filled Fjord in the background is about 6km wide…

Matt Jones:

My talk at DxF2009 in Utrecht last week was an hour’s wander around the idea of Time, particularly historical and cultural ideas of time.

My focus was time as a material for interaction design that we should deconstruct and reconstruct in order to create products and services that take advantage of new real-time web technologies.

I has a scheme. Or, more properly, Ariana and I has a scheme. On Twitter, I’ve been joking about turning some of my stupider comments into t-shirts. And then I thought, hold on, there’s only one way to make this joke funnier. And that’s to actually do it. So Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, this is what we’re going to do.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #001: LOVE:

Also, for this first week, we’re also offering a couple of other things that will be perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

I’m awake. Really. Was up til 4am finishing my end of the WOLVERINE Marvel Anime. Am at the pub, throwing the end of Red Bull number three into my head. Things are afoot today. As Benjamin Zephaniah said: brothers and sisters, I have a Scheme.

So give me an hour or so and I’ll show you.

Also I have lots of things to show you today. Broadcasting commences after I have hunted down some lunch, out here in the wilds of old Southend…

NIGHTMARE FUEL: a spoken-word podcast for Hallowe’en by a bunch of fine horror writers, including SD Hintz, Rob Callahan and my old friend MontiLee Stormer.  Perfect for a quiet Sunday night.

Tonight at my internet cave:

* The London MCM Expo Aftermath Thread – Thoughts or comments on the show? Got photos?

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Super Ann – a tougher than usual R/R for any artist who wants to play. JUDGE DREDD artist Paul J Holden has already had a go.

* Comics on Sale this Week (Oct 28)

* Solipsistic Pop – a UK comics anthology – leading up to its big launch at ICA in November.

* Warren’s Ancient Jukebox – still trawling through the depths of my memory and YouTube mostly for my own amusement

* The Autumn Interrogation Of Warren 2009 – on and bloody on.

Some of these have been seen here before. I’m assembling, trying to get it all in front of me and see what it is. This is like the bit when Rolf Harris paints live on tv, and there’s just a bunch of random marks on the canvas, and he winks at the camera and says "Can you tell what it is yet?" And I can’t. But the marks — or, at least, the pre-treated canvas before I start making marks — are kind of interesting. There’s no process to the creative process. It’s just trying a bunch of stuff and doing anything that might work until you get where you want to be.

Anyway. Consider this your Weekend Web Zen or something.

The post-reality movement’s two signature artistic forms are the talking head video broadcast, and the op-ed. One wouldn’t think of these as being art works, as in carefully crafted fictions, but really, you have to see news in the post-reality movement’s view point. It isn’t about news, or facts, it is about how those facts are presented. Like a portrait, the idea is to flatter the consumer, not to present a realistic depiction. Real-esque is closer to the goal. If the patron looks at the portrait and likes what he or she sees, then the artist keeps getting to make more of them.

(Corrente)

The recourse to History proposed by experts of postmodernity is a cheap trick that allows them to avoid the question of Time, the regime of trans-historical temporality derived from technological ecosystems. If in fact there is a crisis today, it is a crisis of ethical and esthetic references, the inability to come to terms with events in an environment where the appearances are against us. With the growing imbalance between direct and indirect information that comes of the development of various means of communication, and its tendency to privilege information mediated to the detriment of meaning, it seems that the reality effect replaces immediate reality.

– Paul Virilio

Amnesia is a critical part of our repertoire of distraction that enables us efficiently to recycle each mistake, each crime, each stupidity that we imagined was safely disposed of.

- Rem Koolhaas

Commencing Book Four.

Well… it is, but I have a fair amount of stuff to slog through today, so I’m ignoring this place until tonight. I’ll keep twitter on, probably, and you can always send me interesting materials, nice things and dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which is warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

Slightly mental drawing below is by Annie Wu.

• Bees on cocaine: The facts
  "The men, for reasons that seemed good to them at the time, got some bees hooked on cocaine and then turned them out to find some sugar. According to the boffins, cocaine turns good bees – productive members of the hive – into untrustworthy scumbags…"
  (tags:sci drugs wtf ignobel )
• Brain transplant bird points to origin of communication – life – 20 October 2009 – New Scientist
  "Creating chimeras with the higher brain of a songbird and the hindbrain of a non-singer may one day shed light on the evolution of birdsong, and even human speech."
  (tags:sci comms )
• Gallery – Where will NASA send its astronauts next? – Image 1 – New Scientist
  "The panel has created a menu of five plans for the space agency. It has given each 12 scores in various categories (PDF), including science benefits, safety, benefit to the US workforce and schedule. The committee says it will not assign single overall scores to the options in its final report, so New Scientist has ranked the five plans…"
  (tags:space pol )
• Humans Are Still Evolving, Study
  "Researchers in the US studying two generations of contemporary women found evidence of natural selection among humans that showed we are still evolving despite advances in medical care and standards of living"
  (tags:med )
• UFO alert: police officer sees aliens at crop circle – Telegraph
  "A police officer contacted British UFO experts after seeing three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle near Avebury, Wiltshire."
  (tags:cult weird ufo )
• Master mechanism behind regeneration of body parts discovered
  "Using zebrafish as a model, researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered how the process of regeneration of body parts works."
  (tags:med bodymod )
• Balloon boy’s father ‘wanted TV fame before world ends in 2012′ – Telegraph
  "Richard Heene, the man suspected of the alleged "balloon boy" hoax, was driven by a conviction that the world will come to a cataclysmic end in 2012, according to a friend."
  (tags:weird crime culture )

It is barely alive. It is Wednesday. It is warren ellis dot com. Morning. Look at this.

• ?Abusive rabbi? Elior Chen to be extradited to Israel
  "Chen, a self-styled rabbi, allegedly influenced members of his flock to abuse their children in order to ?correct their corrupt souls.?"
  (tags:crime cult fucking+scum )
• Churches denounce African children as ?witches?
  "His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat…"
  (tags:crime cult fucking+scum kill+them+all )

If you’re just a bit too zen for Matt Jones’ GET EXCITED AND MAKE THINGS, then maybe you need Adam Greenfield’s BREATHE DEEP AND LET GO OF THINGS shirt. "All proceeds will be directed to Human Rights Watch and a mixture of Buddhist charities," Adam says.

ESCALANTE: Matt Webb for BERG gave the keynote at Web Directions on 8 October 2009. A 50-minute mp3 at the link.

The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

Science fiction, hiking, squirting information into people’s brains, media design and cultural invention. Is very good.